When was the last time you audited your business website? It’s worth taking five minutes today to check it’s not making any of these common mistakes.
So you’ve been in business for a while and your business website looks great. However, you’re just not gaining the traction, sales, enquiries or interest you’d like.
Have you had someone review your website and provide comments? A friend? A colleague? Sometimes this is a great way to receive some input and suggestions that you never thought of. Other times it can be a bit … well … painful to hear. Especially when some of the suggestions may not be relevant to your business or business model.
What if you could audit your business website yourself? What if you could check it wasn’t making any glaring errors, errors that would likely be getting in the way of converting? Well your wish is my command.
Here are five common website mistakes that make your business look unprofessional and could be potentially impacting on sales.
1. Poor grammar
If English is not your strong point you should consider hiring a copywriter or, at the very least, a proofreader. If the grammar on your site is not up to scratch it might be perceived that your business is not locally-based and as you can imagine, this is not a good thing if you are locally-based!
2. Slow loading speed
Have you come across a website that takes FOREVER to load? The answer to that question is ‘Yes’. And what do you do when you come across such a site? Well you go to another site. Because there is always another site, one that loads in half the time.
Happily this error is usually an easy fix – most loading issues are due to the size of the images on your site. When you’re preparing images for your site, make sure you (or your developer) compresses them to less than 100kb (there is a way to do this without compromising image quality).
3. Not mobile friendly
If your site is not responsive, spend the money now to make it so. More people are accessing the internet, surfing and making purchases on tablets and mobile phones than ever before. Don’t lose the opportunity to get the attention of a potential customer the second they find you. You need to ensure you are in the market, on their radar and available to let them purchase. Now.
4. Stuck in the past
Website trends are moving fast these days. This means you simply cannot set up your website and then forget about it for even six months. If you do not keep abreast of the latest technology and trends, your site will start to look dated very quickly. Look around to see what top websites are doing. Sites like crayon.co also have some great examples and give you an idea of the latest trends that are making waves.
5. A dead blog
You might be surprised to know that one of the first things potential customers do is check out your blog (if you have one) to see what you ‘are about’. They will often judge your professionalism and expertise in your chosen field based on your blog posts (blogs are a proven credibility and trust tool). So you need to either post regularly or do not post at all. Potential customers will wonder if you are even still in business if you’ve not posted for some time.
So there you go, five common mistakes, but all very easily fixed. The best thing is, because they’re so common, the websites that don’t feature any of the above will quickly streak ahead of the pack!
When was the last time you did an audit of your business website?
